Middle eastern foreign policy is the one topic assured to bring the house down around the ears, no matter what position may be taken. The continued ill-will between the Palestinians and the Israelis is at once both one of the most complex and nuanced of conflicts, and one of the most blatantly bisected into warring quarters. Sometimes we also forget that what is foreign policy for us, is someone else’s domestic policy.

Recommended Reading

Nahum Goldmann, “The Future of Israel,” Foreign Affairs, April 1970. There is much to be extracted from this piece, even though it is framed in Cold War terms and assumes the polarization of the Soviet Union and the United States. Among other insightful statements, Goldmann offers the prescient comment that gains secured by force of arms are, by their very nature, transient.

“Recent statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggest that he is increasingly aware of the fundamental dilemma that Israel is bound to face: If it holds on to the occupied territories, it will be forced to choose between being a Jewish but non-democratic state and being a democratic state but seeing the Jews become a minority in their own land. It is unclear whether this dilemma is a pressing concern for the current government, but the fact that Netanyahu brought it up is quite significant.” [CM March 11, 2014]

On the other side of the border, Hamas won the 2006 elections in Gaza, but it’s hardly the only group in play. The Jewish Policy Center has thumb-nail sketches of the other players in the game as they were constituted as of May 2012. Just as there are segments of Israeli politics which are incorporated into the mix of domestic/foreign politics, there are several groups which have adherents in Gaza who are not directly associated with Hamas.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is once such group, supported by Iran, it is apolitical and primarily interested in armed resistance to Israel, [CFR] The Al-Quds Brigade has also made its presence known in the recent conflicts with Israel, as the armed wing of the PIJ. [Al Arabiya] Efforts to negotiate any truce or even cease fire agreements has to acknowledge that the Azzeddine el-Kasam (armed wing of Hamas) may or may not be able to control the PIJ or coordinate with it. In sum, there is no shortage of groups of varying physical capacities, membership, affiliation, and ideological strains in Gaza. Nor is one likely to find an undated ‘scorecard’ which includes all the possible variations.*

Our Domestic Issues

The right wing talking point of the day is that Secretary of State John Kerry is “feckless.” This category would include almost anyone who (1) isn’t following the Israeli lead unconditionally, and (2) has the temerity to suggest that there are other players in the game who have some, even small, parts which might be inserted into the script.

Consider for a moment, the last cease fire negotiated, the one in which the Egyptian government (Muslim Brotherhood) was trusted by Hamas, and could assert pressure on the government in Gaza to accept terms. Since the ouster of the government in September 2013, the now clearly anti-Hamas Egyptian government no longer has leverage in the situation in Gaza. Israel, no doubt would prefer to have the military government of Egypt as the interlocutor, but this seems almost like wishful thinking for times now gone in the rubble of Egyptian politics. Secretary Kerry suggested two other interlocutors — Qatar and Turkey — which now may have more leverage with Hamas, to the fury of the Israeli press. [Haaretz]

While the shuffling and realignment of Hamas and its allies plays out the role of the Palestinian Authority remains a problem. Does acknowledging Gazan/Hamas issues necessarily diminish the clout of the Palestinian Authority? How can we keep Egypt engaged in the peace process while accepting that the Gazan/Hamas government doesn’t have much use for their services?

Is it enough to say that a cease fire — who’s even hoping for a truce now? — mentions “addressing security issues” as an umbrella for more specific discussions, or must the agreement include particular security issues to be resolved, or at least discussed? And, by whom?

Complicating the matter even more are the charges and counter-charges shedding more heat than light on the subject. Even a comparatively innocuous timeline of events in Gaza drew angry fire from commenters who decried its failure to include elements of the conflict going back to the foundation of the state of Israel, and the validation of Palestinian claims after World War I. [CNN]

At the very least we have a conflict in which Goldmann’s central question from 1970 (Is Israel a democracy with a Jewish minority, or a Jewish state without a democracy?) and his secondary question, (How does one disentangle a question in which there is no right or wrong, but two rights in conflict?) both remain unanswered.